Evie Wyld has been named the winner of the 2021 Stella Prize for her brilliant historical novel, The Bass Rock.
The Bass Rock is a novel that weaves together the lives of three women across four centuries. It’s about the legacy of male violence and the ways in which these traumas ripple and reverberate across time and place. Each woman’s choices are circumscribed, in ways big and small, by the men in their lives. But in sisterhood there is the hope of survival and new life.
Chair of the judging panel, Zoya Patel, said of The Bass Rock: ‘This is a novel that demonstrates the author’s versatility of style, with the separate narrative parts each having an individual voice. And yet, at no point does the book feel disjointed. Instead, it is as though Evie Wyld has chosen each and every word with precision, building a novel that is a true work of art.’
One of the most acclaimed local releases of last year, our bookseller described it as ‘an unsettling and compelling book which might particularly appeal to readers of historical and contemporary literary fiction.’
Wyld was shortlisted alongside five other authors: Rebecca Giggs (Fathoms), S. L. Lim (Revenge), Laura Jean McKay (The Animals in that Country), Louise Milligan (Witness) and Mirandi Riwoe (Stone Sky Gold Mountain).
